Because the San Francisco Silent Film Festival awaits the much-anticipated reopening of a newly renovated Castro Theater, it quickly pushed its conventional spring dates to late fall and relocated throughout the bridge to the attractive Orinda Theater. A jewel of an impartial theater that embraces its film palace previous with plush seats, Artwork Deco thrives, and basic posters and memorabilia displayed all through the constructing, it was a stunning selection for the most important silent movie competition within the U.S. This 12 months, the five-day occasion boasted 19 characteristic movies, 11 shorts, and a fraction of an in any other case misplaced movie, alongside the same old introductions, shows on a few of the restorations featured on the competition, and stay music for each single screening.
SFSFF 2025 opened with a centenary screening of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. A large hit in 1925 and one in every of Chaplin’s most beloved movies, the epic comedy sends the Tramp into the Klondike outfitted with little greater than his bowler, cane, and saggy pants. It’s the little man versus greed, starvation, and the fury of nature, his romantic idealism overcoming the cynicism and violence of the tradition that (as we see later within the competition) destroyed so many.
Chaplin recut and rereleased the movie with music, sound results, and narration in 1942, trimming scenes, shortening pictures, even altering key components of the narrative, and he tried to destroy all prints of the unique silent model. Fortunately some survived and Kevin Brownlow and David Gill made a primary cross at restoring the unique lower in 1993. This new version, backed by the Chaplin property, incorporates extra materials from archives all over the world.
Within the “Wonderful Tales from the Archives” presentation the following day, Arnold Lozano of the Chaplin Workplace in Paris and Elena Tammaccaro of L’Immagine Ritrovato in Bologna, which scanned, reconstructed, and restored the movie, in contrast pictures and sequences from the varied parts out there and illustrated how reinstating a key second reshot for the 1942 launch provides pathos to the Tramp’s odyssey. Whereas the 1942 revision continues to be favored by the Chaplin property because the “official” model (following Chaplin’s needs), the unique silent launch is now again to its full glory, or as shut as we’re prone to get. The screening was accompanied by a stay orchestra performing Timothy Brock’s adaptation of the rating Chaplin composed for the 1942 launch.
The restoration of Beau Geste, Herbert Brenon’s riveting 1926 French International Legion journey, was a revelation for me. It’s a rousing piece of “huge boys personal journey” that opens with the thriller of a seemingly haunted fort with disappearing corpses, rewinds to a bucolic English childhood and a jewel theft, and anchors itself on the love and loyalty of three brothers who depart residence to lose themselves in an African outpost. Brenon’s muscular path offers us treachery and brotherhood with an epic scope—the pictures of the huge desert give the California location an unique really feel—and a jingoistic sensibility widespread to the period. The Arabs are faceless dangerous guys and solely the Brit and American troopers are granted a way of honor.
These caveats apart, it’s a blast. Ronald Colman smiles by way of his sacrifice because the eldest Geste brother with a deft aptitude, Alice Joyce suggests the burden of the world behind her unhappy eyes, Noah Beery takes sadistic glee in his command, and a shifty William Powell is a scheming, toadying criminal hiding out within the Legion. The dynamic rating by the Mont Alto Movement Image Orchestra, expanded to 9 members for this presentation, builds on the unique rating composed by Hugo Reisenfeld and enhances the shifting moods and constructing drama fantastically.
Fixed revivals, re-releases, and recut editions left the unique supplies in such poor situation that Beau Geste was incomplete and successfully unavailable for many years aside from 16mm collector prints. The restoration was undertaken by veterans Robert Harris and James Mockoski, who shaped a brand new firm, Artcraft, to revive the silent movies of the Paramount Footage vaults and Paramount assortment on the Library of Congress. On this case, it additionally meant a seek for supplies to reconstruct the complete lower of the movie’s unique roadshow launch. Mockoski walked audiences by way of the challenges they confronted, together with combining frames from broken or compromised supplies to create an entire picture. The outcomes are nothing in need of outstanding, and movie lovers will have the ability to see for themselves with a Blu-ray launch (full the with Mont Alto rating) from the brand new Artcraft residence video imprint on the finish of November.
Beau Geste was one in every of three movies, alongside 1926’s The New Klondike and 1921’s The Affairs of Anatol, restored and offered by Artcraft on the competition. Lewis Milestone’s The New Klondike, a baseball movie that turns into satire of the Twenties actual property bubble in Florida, is a comic book lark with Thomas Meighan as an growing older pitcher and Paul Kelly as a dim-witted however loyal small-town batter who submits to the real-estate hustle. And Cecil B. DeMille’s The Affairs of Anatol is a lavish intercourse comedy that softens the scandalous play by Arthur Schnitzer. The wry mixture of spectacle, intercourse, and social satire stars Wallace Reid because the newlywed society man who neglects is younger spouse (Gloria Swanson) to “save” stunning younger girls from their sinful decisions.
Reid’s Anatol is much less a philanderer than a self-righteous boob with poor instincts, and the manufacturing applies an ethical suture over the saucy recommendations. Together with its supporting solid of rising stars, amongst them Monte Blue as a rustic rube and Bebe Daniels because the deliciously named Devil Synne, The Affairs of Anatol’s extravagant units and costuming assist flip the movie into a stunning spectacle of extra and decadence. The studio sprung for Handscheigl colour (a means of portray colour immediately on the print with stencils) for the artwork title playing cards and some eye-popping pictures within the movie and this version restores the colour to its full, wealthy glory.
One of many nice talents of cinema is to move audiences to different lands, different cultures, different methods of life. A piece of proto-poetic realism, 1924’s Island Fisherman stars an intent, younger Charles Vanel as Yann, a dreamy fisherman who spends months working the harmful waters of Iceland and treats the ocean as a lover as a lot as a pressure of nature, a lot to the anguish of his village sweetheart (Sandra Milovanoff). Vanel’s mild method and emotionless face offers him an nearly religious high quality, suggesting a tranquility in his connection to the ocean. Director Jacques de Baroncelli, in the meantime, enriches the village life with the rhythms and rituals of a conventional tradition fully disconnected from the frenzy of the city world and its enticements.
Lars Hanson is the rugged and rebellious son of a farm proprietor who leaves his inheritance behind for the itinerate lifetime of a lumberjack in The Track of the Scarlet Flower, from 1919. Directed by Mauritz Stiller, this adaptation of Johannes Linnankoski’s novel performs with the idealistic picture of the defiant particular person whose embrace of life is undercut by his reckless romances and the struggling of a younger girl left behind within the wreckage of his willfulness. The scene the place he confronts his culpability and selfishness, talking to his reflection in bar mirror that quickly responds, is great, even when the worth paid for his lesson is the dying of an harmless. But in comparison with the Christian moralizing of so many Hollywood epics, each Island Fisherman and The Track of the Scarlet Flower have an nearly pantheistic high quality, with heroes extra beholden to the majesty and energy of the seas, forests, and rivers than any faith.
Czech actress Anny Ondra is greatest identified to western audiences for her work with Alfred Hitchcock, notably his landmark debut sound thriller Blackmail, however she was a significant star in Europe earlier than coming to England. The 1928 German movie Saxophone Susy reveals an effervescent facet of the actress as a fun-loving heiress who swaps identities with a pal to change into a stage dancer. There’s romance and a comedy of errors in what’s greatest described as a silent musical, a bubbly confection with dance numbers, a theme tune (with lyrics splashed throughout the display), and an completely successful main woman setting the rhythm.
Anna Might Wong left America for Europe within the late Twenties searching for components past the stereotyped supporting roles Hollywood needed to provide. Richard Eichberg developed Track, a 1928 German melodrama set within the far east, particularly for Wong, who performs a avenue lady taken in by a beefy, hot-tempered knife-thrower (Heinrich George). He develops a brand new act along with her however has by no means gotten over his earlier love, a self-absorbed ballerina (Lila Lee), and might’t see Track’s love for him. Taking part in the gamut from plucky urchin to glamorous showgirl, and is magnificent, worldly but harmless and compassionate, in a uncommon function with depth and dimension.
Ernst Lubitsch’s Kohlhiesel’s Daughters, a 1920 remodeling of The Taming of the Shrew as a Bavarian farce, stars a pleasant Henny Porter as each Liesel, the brawny, ill-tempered older sister who doubles because the tavern’s bouncer, and the candy, flirtatious Gretel. It’s enjoyable to see a younger Emil Jannings as Gretel’s boisterous suitor, the city roughneck who’s clearly the right match for Liesel. Successful in Europe however by no means launched theatrically within the U.S. and unavailable on video, it reveals a rowdy and rambunctious Lubitsch going all in on bodily comedy—a whole room is systematically upended in a single scene as Jannings performs the tyrannical husband—that turns into a type of courtship. Lubitsch cited it as one his favorites of his German movies and there’s hope for an eventual disc launch of this restoration from Germany’s Murnau Stiftung.
Different highlights of this 12 months’s competition included new restorations of three Sherlock Holmes two-reel mysteries from England, Clarence Brown’s 1928 gold rush drama The Path of ‘98 (the hard-scrabble flip facet of Chaplin’s Gold Rush), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1925 dramedy Grasp of the Home, Tod Browning’s horror basic The Unknown from 1927 starring Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford, and The Satan’s Circus, Danish filmmaker Benjamin Christensen’s 1926 American debut, in addition to the not too long ago unearthed My Son, a thought-lost Russian melodrama from 1928, incomplete however eye-opening in its highly effective intimacy. The competition will return to the Castro in Might 2026, again in its longtime residence and acquainted spring slot.
The San Francisco Silent Film Festival ran from November 12—16.
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